Dawn of the Final Day
by SilentProtagonist000
Summary: Darkfic. There is no more time. What is done is done. If only something, anything, could have been done earlier. Rated for themes and a bit of blood, just to be safe.


**This is a birthday gift for my IRL Pokefiend. (She's seventeen. One year away from being legal! Woooo!) I've never played Majora's Mask, so I went in a little blind with this one. I think I got everything mostly (?) correct, but if I screwed up massively, please alert me with a review. **

**I would appreciate some reviews on how I did here, because I think I might like to dabble in this fandom a bit. Thank you very much!**

**-Silent-Protagonist**

****()()()

_"Whenever there is a meeting, a parting shall follow. But that parting needs not last forever. Whether a parting be forever or merely for a short while... that is up to you."_

The tolling of the bell screamed over the hills of this nameless doomed land—a brass cry that sounded far too finite for the comfort of any citizen. In fact, no one dared moved from their beds on the dawn of this day as the bleeding sun trickled over the tarnished jade horizon, the sound of the Clockworks causing every blade of grass for miles to bend over and shrivel in death. Life, on the gory dawn of this final day, would be many times better than the chaos that every soul in the towns of this nameless doomed land knew was coming. In a way, they did not mind, as times were hard, with their sandstone buildings eaten away by ivy strands and uprooted streets haunted by the broken. Hundreds of years passed in the dirty solitude as the people prayed and wished, hoping that the angry god that ruled above them would be vanquished.

It did. Oral tradition, passed down by generations of desperate aspirants, told them that legend set the map for a hero many moons from their times—many, many moons, not unlike the looming, pockmarked sphere that glared harshly upon them from both the daytime and evening skies. Its rubies of eyes, combusting in the flames of millennia of simmering hatred toward mankind, witnessed these tales from a distance that was as close as the range of a well-shot arrow. The people were afraid of the moon—it wanted them, just as much as they tried in vain to wish him away. Still, even as the days wore their clothing threadbare and their generations grew thinner in numbers, the citizens of this nameless doomed land were rosy. Word was, after all, that they were to have a hero.

One hero. Just one. That was all they needed. Just a little more time, and he would save them. Every single one of them.

But he—even _he_—failed them, for the tolling of the bells told them that there was no more time.

()()()

_It's time._

Along the grief-stained cobblestone of this doomed land was one building, shorter than the rest but still just as worn and tired from the years of disrepair. The paint on the surface of the chipping sandstone—crimson as the eyes of the virulent moon that floated closer every day—was no longer the vibrant shade it had once been in more prosperous times. Beside a window hewn from splintering, rotting wood sat an inscription of a business that had seen better times: _Happy Mask Shop_, the black letters so dull that the thin coating of dirt that surrounded it nearly deleted them completely. Blown open slightly by the morning breeze, the door sat ajar, the dust mingling in a sordid ball on the front steps. Inside, the single room that constituted the dying business was engulfed in the darkness that representing the last tendrils of night as dawn rose on this Final Day.

Dark, of course, except for a small stripe of red light from the incoming sun slipping in from between the tight seal of a white curtain on the north wall, kissing the single living man that occupied the squalid room. His movement was highlighted by the cherry twilight as he pinched the cloth of the drapes in his bony fingers, his skeletal form hunched over his desk and his red brow furrowed in defined anguish. He is surrounded in this pitch black with walls and walls of masks—every emotion that he wishes he could express but cannot are in his wares, from frowning to smiling, from laughing to crying. He is not sure what he feels now, as his gingery hair sticks to his forehead, his skin appearing sickly and sallow in the rising light. He collects faces, and yet not even his own can coerce him enough into emerging out from under their protective imaginations.

The salesman of masks continues to clean his favorite face—a fabled disguise from cultural legend, slashed with the brightest of colors that seemed not to have faded over time, a stark contrast from the eroding town around him. Its yellow spines, protruding from every angle of the heart-shaped expression, poke insistently at their owner as he runs the filthy blind over them. The wild pastels stared openly at him, the beady eyes of the empty mask pleading distantly. Even as he cleans, the salesman can feel the pure evil that radiates from the deepest fibers of the wood, laughing a breathless, muted chortle of victory in his ear. He sighs, his inhalation turning to frozen steam in the chilling darkness. The sun is only in the process of climbing the skies; the daily warmth he feels has not yet reached him or all of the doomed land. Strangely, however, he does not feel the cold, even as he senses the gaze of the endless moon peeking at him through the slit of the window where the sunlight dares enter.

He glances down at the mask, his red eyes pregnant with an unborn child of sorrow. He can tell that it is almost smiling up at him, proud of a shameful honor that has yet to be achieved on this Final Day. "You started all this, you know," he murmurs, the usually high tone of his voice dropping so low that it would have been imperceptible to anyone listening—namely, the moon. The moon could hear all, but the salesman spoke so that he could avoid its ghastly wrath. It never fell, only so it could listen.

The mask says nothing, but to the salesman, it is screaming. The deafening howl of its silence frightened him more than its impending words. The other masks in the gloomy shop seem to turn to eavesdrop in the startling but quiet cry—the salesman knows this without shifting his position himself, for he can feel them watching. They are no better than the moon, who the salesman has noted through a drift in his vision that it has crept closer to the nameless doomed land in the few minutes that he began. _Termina,_ it exclaims, and at once, the salesman understands the cruelty that courses through the lifeless veins of the mask. Oh, this land—it is not nameless anymore, he realizes. It has a name; a name bestowed upon it by generations turgid with the burden of spanning hills and mountains untamable by human spirit. The mask plans to remind him of this in Termina's impending last moments—force into his damned mind the fact that the end of this land is no long meaningless.

This place has a name; a name and citizens, people drowning in wells of denial that the hero had failed. To them, this was a farce. Why would legend lie to them? Why would the words of history refute them the salvation they deserved as a quiet, unassuming nation? They had done nothing wrong—and it was a fault of the normally nomadic salesman that he was not on another part of the planet during this time.

But as he glances out the sliver of window, the salesman understands that there is no more room for him on this world. The hero had been roped into a destiny that was not his own—he had merely been searching for a lost friend and found himself at the center of the fate of a country he cared not about. As the salesman of masks expected, it had been too much for him. The hero was gone now, his impact not even written in blood on the walls of this town. The salesman had his precious mask back now, and to him, that was all that mattered. He could die here with his commodities, hanging on desperately to his sandstone building and staring at him and the immoral, crumbling disguise in his hands and the dying light of the dawn seeping onto his shaking hands, as the sun fell to a solar eclipse of the moon that hurtled far too slowly towards the earth. The formerly red glow of daybreak dims considerably until it is gone, enveloping the salesman and his inert faces in the imminent shroud of death.

The salesman sighs, as he knows it won't be much longer now. He chooses not to mull and busies himself instead, not dwelling on his luckless position as he swipes the once-virgin cloth over the mask once more, clearing invisible dust from his beloved child. However, a dank, humid wetness overcomes him, chilling his skin to the bone. Puzzled, he draws his hand away from the mask on his lap and turns it over, his palm facing him upright. Even amid the darkness, the salesman sees the blood, fresh and red and dripping from the tips of his fingers. The mask, he notices, is bleeding profusely from every natural wooden pore, the incessant flow pooling into an eerie pond beneath the salesman's bare feet. The white curtain is drenched in crimson from the murder of the mask, sticky from the metallic liquid. Immediately, the salesman flickers his gaze outside—almost as an afterthought—and sees the moon's bronze, pockmarked surface a mere hair's breadth from his shop.

"Majora." He speaks aloud in his solemn tone, every emotion—and yet none—plaguing him all at once. He is numb. "Why would you do this?"

The air is sucked from his lungs. Strangely, before he hears no more, he hears laughter.

For one beat, he becomes aware that it is _his own_.


End file.
